Many of today's computer and mobile device users subscribe to information feeds such as sports scores, stock prices, weather information, news, one or more email inboxes, online calendars, and a wide variety of other information. Supporting these subscriptions using existing technologies involves massive, expensive, redundant, and geographically distributed data centers capable of terminating Internet Protocol (IP) connections from millions of computing devices.
The present disclosure appreciates that such data centers have a number of drawbacks. For example, current data centers are often unable increase their scale to accommodate new users quickly and effectively. A host of regulatory and national security issues can arise when data centers serve users in more than one nation, which is increasingly common and desirable due to the global connectivity of today's communications networks and diverse economic and regulatory environments. In addition, security and redundancy concerns lead to cost doubling or worse, because to ensure “always available” service, each data center may require a second, redundant data center. The redundant data center may be geographically isolated from the first, and of comparable proportions, with expensive real-time mirroring of all communication. While a variety of current technologies help to alleviate scalability problems, the present disclosure identifies that these technologies do not help with the fault-tolerance and regulatory concerns associated with large off-shore data centers.